Evaluate use of Lando vs alternatives

[felixarntz]

While I initially started this project with Lando, we are still in an early experimental phase. I'd like us to evaluate how it works and whether it suits our use-case well, plus other considerations like maintenance etc.

This is a call to a broad discussion. I think it would help to get some thoughts on things you like vs problems you're facing. We might also want to list alternatives that might be worth trying out.

Even if we switched away from Lando, the majority of work done in here could still be reused.

[felixarntz]

I much like the concepts of Lando. Configuration is fairly straightforward, but still flexible as you can override pretty much anything you like. What I also think is great is that it is just a configuration file that can be included in the repository, vs. something you have to download as part of something bigger (for example a site in VVV cannot run outside of a VVV installation).

There are some problems though:

• It seems to have issues with super-high CPU usage that drains Mac battery quickly. I'm not entirely sure whether that is an issue on Lando or Docker side. See https://github.com/lando/lando/issues/1088 or https://github.com/docker/for-mac/issues/1759 for conversations.
• There are a few other substantial issues, such as environment variables in .env files only being applied on initial start, or .env files unable to be located when in any subdirectory than the regular one.
• I generally wonder about support of the project. Some of these issues have been open for quite a while, and responses by maintainers seem to be very sparse. It's also odd that Lando often requires very specific Docker versions to work correctly.

Of course I'm highlighting quite a few negative things here, rather than positives. But this is probably natural. I definitely hope we can proceed with this, but before we just blindly follow this tool, we should think about it further.

[westonruter]

+1 to your observations. I had asked on Twitter about when the 3.0.0 release is to be expected, and the response was:

We aren't setting the release by date, rather, its as fast as we can get certain issues addressed

But commit activity has tapered off a lot since September.

Related to super-high CPU usage, I've also noticed PHP can run extremely slowly in the container. The unit tests for the AMP plugin, where it runs the PHP-CSS-Parser, are very slow. Similarly, running make-pot command is very slow when PHP parses the JS files for gettext calls. It doesn't seem to be an I/O problem.

Another issue that @mehigh and I have noticed is sometimes file changes stop syncing into the container. The fix seems to be to restart Docker itself, so that seems to be a Docker for Mac problem not Lando.

[westonruter]

Another big pain point: running lando in pre-commit hook is broken, as is passing string arguments: https://github.com/lando/lando/issues/904#issuecomment-450975991

[westonruter]

3.0.0-rc.2 is out now and it seems much improved: https://docs.devwithlando.io/guides/updating-to-rc2.html

I'm noticing the PHP performance to be way better. Apparently this is due to Xdebug not actually being disabled, while it is now.